Introduction

The beginning of the 2010s witnessed the rapid development of smart grid. The smart grid initiative (or similar concepts such as Intelligrid, utility of the future, and the Future- Grid) [1–5] is an attempt to modernize the current power grid with digital technology for communication, computing, and control to improve overall performance and to accommodate a high penetration of alternative energy sources and load responses. Among the many objectives related to smart grid, a key goal is to improve the electricity service to all end consumers such as residential houses, commercial buildings, and industrial loads. This calls for two-way communication in smart grid, i.e., power consumption/demand reports from the users to the centre (uplink) and price information from the centre to the users (downlink). Hence, the communication infrastructure for the power market is receiving intensive study, which also brings about a paradigm shift in the communities of communications and networking. Among many proposals for the communication infrastructure, wireless communication is a promising one due to its low cost, large coverage, and fast deployment [6–9].

Although the communication infrastructure can considerably improve the efficiency of the power market, it also brings significant vulnerabilities since malicious users can attack the communication system and thus cause various damages to the smart grid, or even result in large-area blackout. Hence, the security issue is of first priority in the study of smart grid and has attracted substantial attention in industry and academia.